If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, "I had the craziest dream last night," I would be in Paris right now staying at the George V, drinking champagne and eating platters of foods not found on the menu of Applebee's. Most of the time, people that share their "crazy" dreams with me tend to tell me their dream to illustrate how crazy their dreams are and not to actually understand it. They tell me, "There was a bear, a pig and a guy who looked like Simon Cowell, only he was really my mother, and we were on the tea cup ride at Disneyland and we had to make the teacups go really fast or Sarah Palin was going to start dancing on top of the Matterhorn," and then they look at me, expecting me to affirm their sense of what a wacky dream it was and how their dream is proof that dreams are just wild and meaningless. Instead I calmly and quietly ask them, "So, what do you make of it?" The dreamer usually looks at me like I have asked them to explain advanced physics to them, replying, "I don't know, it's just crazy. " And that is usually the end of it. The dream is then discarded and no further inquiry occurs.
Read the rest of this post over at my column Freudian Sip @ Psychology Today.